Welcome to One Positive Present, the place Observer highlights a lately opened exhibition at a museum not in New York Metropolis, a spot we all know and love that already receives loads of consideration.
Fearmongering is without doubt one of the main pleasures of going right into a pharmacy as of late. You may by no means inform what new product they’ve determined to lock up, with the implication that deranged persons are stealing it for inscrutable functions. And what new plight might be depicted on lurid fliers? These days, I’ve been noticing extra warnings concerning the risks of ticks. These are at all times accompanied by drawings at 10,000x scale, the bugs turning into furry and menacing, like savage woodchucks that may not solely provide you with Lyme illness but additionally steal your toddler. Ticks have been by no means one thing we cared about once I was a child. My brother and I’d return from our adventures within the woods trying like blueberry bushes, completely lined in ripe, swollen bloodsuckers.
A brand new pair of exhibitions on the Nationwide Gallery of Artwork and the Smithsonian Nationwide Museum of Pure Historical past discover this style of wondrous disgust at the next degree. “Little Beasts: Artwork, Surprise and the Pure World” collects seventy-five prints, drawings and work alongside some sixty objects devoted to the intersection of science and artwork in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-century Europe. The exhibitions characteristic depictions of bugs and animals by Joris and Jacob Hoefnagel, Jan van Kessel, Albrecht Dürer, Teodoro Filippo di Liagno and Wenceslaus Hollar and by different artists and zoological illustrators.
Bugs are the guts of this exhibition as a result of they have been such a recent oddity, labeled as “little beasts”—beestjes in Dutch—“little worms” and even “little birds.” Curators on the NGA labored with their colleagues on the Smithsonian Nationwide Museum of Pure Historical past to determine each creature in van Kessel’s Bugs and a Sprig of Rosemary (1653), which renders the plant as some unusual futuristic structure populated by eleven vivid and specimens, all painted in three dimensions, with shadows and a hypothetical, inconsistent mild supply. However that’s okay—these pleasant little monsters are on a catwalk.
However the showstopper would appear to be the excerpts from Joris Hoefnagel’s 4 Components, a sequence of 270 organic watercolors made within the late 1500s. In contrast to many of the works on this present, these weren’t created for public consumption however to point out his associates and patrons. You may inform these are valuable, particularly his Southern Hawker Dragonfly (c. 1575/1590s), which is a bit jewel, with crystalline wings and an stomach that slinks like a elaborate bracelet. The scales of his crocodiles are not any much less spectacular or precious.
If these works are correct, they really feel very intimate and private, too. When these research have been sure and printed, they have been distributed into their applicable parts, with birds collected within the quantity Aier, and so forth. Curiously, his bugs have been collected underneath Ignis, or fireplace. Maybe there’s one thing a bit demonic about exploring these many-legged kingdoms. It does power you to rethink a human-centric understanding of the world.
“Little Beasts: Artwork, Surprise and the Pure World” is on the Nationwide Gallery of Artwork by means of November 2, 2025.
Extra exhibition opinions
